


Things Lurking in Shadow

by ImBadWithWords



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: BAMF Peter Parker, Gen, Hydra (Marvel), Super Soldier Serum, Team Up, sometimes you have to use your brain, when crime-fighting means more than hitting people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 14:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15269673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImBadWithWords/pseuds/ImBadWithWords
Summary: When a chemicals manufacturing lab is robbed using remnants of the Vulture's tech, Peter has to do the less interesting part of crime-fighting: looking for clues. What should have been a simple job gets far more complicated with the addition of a few surprising faces.





	Things Lurking in Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> canon? no canon here

Peter didn’t make the trip over the bridge into Brooklyn that often, but as he dropped down onto a building a block away from the chemicals manufacturing lab that had been robbed earlier that week, he felt it was worth the effort.

The sidewalk around the hole in the side of the building was still cordoned off with yellow police tape. It was dark out, with no one walking in the immediate vicinity, and the only car in sight being a dark sedan parked about a hundred yards from the crime scene. Peter had spent enough time as a vigliante to recognize a stakeout car when he saw one. He sighed.

“Makes my job a little tougher,” he murmured to the night air. He stifled a yawn; it was the weekend, meaning he patrolled later than usual, and it was pushing 3:00AM. He backed up to the other side of the building he was on, farthest from the road, and then sprinted across, taking a running leap across the street to the roof of the storefront on the other side. Landing without a sound, he kept low to make sure he wasn’t seen before jumping over the next street to start circling around back of the chemicals lab.

There was no watch car on this side, thankfully, so he made his way across rooftops to station himself directly across from the lab. It was a couple stories shorter than most of the buildings in the area, giving him a decent view of the roof. The company dealt in sometimes-dangerous chemicals and unpredictable gasses, meaning, Peter reasoned, it had to have a pretty expansive ventilation system. But it was probably also one of the most heavily monitored parts of the building for that exact reason. No, the vents probably weren’t a good way in.

As he looked closer, he saw a window to an office on the third floor was open, a light evening breeze rustling papers on the desk inside. He broke into a grin.

“Maybe the ol’ Parker luck is finally turning around.”

Normally he would have tossed a web out and swung over but he was wary of leaving any trace of his presence behind at an active crime scene. The police hated him enough as it was. Instead he dropped down to the ground, jogged across the road and climbed up the wall through the window.

“Ta-da,” he whispered to himself as his feet touched down on the carpeted interior. “And for my next trick, I’m gonna detective the hell out of this place and figure out who has Toomes’s tech.”

_ “Very impressive, Peter.” _

Peter flung himself onto the ceiling as the voice inside his suit startled him.

“Oh my  _ god,  _ Karen, don’t do that! I nearly jumped out of my skin!” he whispered furiously.

_ “Scanners indicate all interior surveillance has been deactivated,”  _  she said.  _ “There is no need to whisper.” _

“Yeah, tell that to my racing heart.” He lowered himself from the ceiling, hanging from his fingertips for a moment before dropping lightly to the ground. “Spidey-sense is giving me a weird vibe about this place. I don’t know what it is.”

_ “A facility such as this houses dozens of unstable chemicals. It could be that you are reacting a potential, though dormant, danger.” _

“Maybe,” he said, unconvinced. “Maybe. It just feels a little too easy, y’know?”

_ “Easy for a super-powered vigliante, perhaps.” _

“Fair enough.”

He listened at the door for a moment before opening it, not taking the chance that just because all the lights were off it meant no one was there. When his ears greeted nothing he tugged it open and stepped outside, pulling it closed behind him. The lenses of his mask automatically adjusted to the lower light of the windowless hallway and two scattered lines of doors stretched out to his left. There was only one door on his right, which a quick peek showed to be a supply closet, so he walked along the wall to reach the ceiling, crawling down the hallway from above out of habit rather than necessity.

“Alright, news reports said that the thieves took chemicals that were in storage, and we saw that they entered from the lowest level instead of up higher, so my guess is that we need to get as low as we can go.”

_ “The blueprints on file for this building indicate two underground levels, the second of which contains a large, high-security vault toward the northeast wall.” _

“Bingo.”

He followed the hallway until he saw a sign for the staircase up ahead. He descended to the ground in front of the door and to his dismay noticed an electronic lock that required a keycard and pin.

“Damn it. Hey, Karen, any chance you—” He cut himself off. Just above the lock were two small lights. The green one was lit.

He pushed on the door experimentally and it swung open without resistance.

“Okay, now I don’t even need spidey-sense to know something weird is going on here.” He held the door open a crack and leaned over to listen, but there was only silence.

_ “It’s possible all security measures were shut down to allow for the investigation,”  _ Karen suggested.

“There’s cooperating with police and then there’s leaving your state-of-the-art lab completely unguarded to give them access.” Peter shook his lead. “This doesn’t feel right.”

_ “Perhaps you should leave.” _

He hesitated a moment, his hand on the door. “I— No. Toomes is my mess and I’ve gotta take care of this.”

He edged open the door further and slipped in, careful to shut it silently behind him. There was zero light in the stairwell and his vision plunged into shades of green as his lenses hurried to compensate, their mechanical whirring loud in his enhanced ears. With a quick word to Karen the flashlight built into the front of his suit switched on and his vision returned to full color.

The slight scuff of his feet against the concrete steps was the only sound echoing around the stairwell as he began to descend. He eased down one flight, then two, three, the twisted, uneasy feeling in his stomach having more to do with common sense and knowledge of action movie tropes than spider-sense. 

A beam of red light spilled out from underneath the door out of the stairwell at the ground floor and Peter threw himself onto the ceiling, heart racing, gaze lasered in on the closed entryway. The light seemed to dim as he watched it, but didn’t disappear. After a minute of waiting, Peter stuck a web to the door handle and eased it open.

Nothing moved.

He fell back to the ground and peaked around the door only to see an exit sign shining red light down the hallway, pushing into the staircase now that it was no longer blocked. He let out a shaky laugh.

“Jeez, I’m jumpy tonight, huh?” A glance down the hall returned nothing else of interest, only a few shut doors, so he turned around and started back down the stairs.

The air became slightly colder as he moved down to the first subterranean floor. His enhanced senses picked up a dampness than he was sure ordinary people wouldn’t even notice, but it dragged on his nerves the same way everything else about the night had so far. At the bottom of the stairs he couldn’t help but feel like the whole world was above his head, waiting for the perfect moment to collapse in on him. It felt a lot further underground than two storeys. 

The heavy metal door leading out of the stairwell moved easily under his super-strength, creaking open with a groan that reverberated up the walls. Soft blue lights in the white floors illuminated the space stretched out in front of him. Labs to the right and left of the revealed hallway could be seen through large windows that took up almost the entirety of the walls on either side, currently laying dormant and empty but filled with machinery that hadn’t been shut down completely, their screens casting a little more light around the space.

As he moved in, Peter’s eyes were drawn immediately to the safe Karen had mentioned; the last ten feet of the corridor was cordoned off with yellow caution tape, a nominal effort to keep people away from the massive safe door that stretched all the way to the twelve-foot ceiling. There were three holes doing down the seam where the door met the wall, each almost as big as Peter’s torso. He got closer and could see that the edges of the holes were scorched and blackened the same way the ruins of the bank had been when his attempt to stop thieves using Vulture’s tech had gone awry.

He ducked under the police tape to get a better look.

“Karen, can you do a quick scan of… all this? Just in case you catch something I miss?”

_ “Of course, Peter.” _

Another beam of light came out of his suit, to the left of the flashlight, where the spider symbol was, and it began passing back and forth over the safe in a wide arc. The door was left open just enough for a person to get through so Peter squeezed into the room, tapping the spider on his chest so Droney could detach and keep analyzing the safe.

“Up the brightness on the flashlight, please, Karen.” The circle of light in front of him grew larger until almost the entire room was visible, reflecting off a half dozen or so glass cubicles containing free standing metal shelves. Further inspection showed clear plastic boxes housing containers bearing the handwritten names of various chemicals.

Peter picked up a clipboard hanging next to the door of the nearest cubicle and scanned it; right at the top of the page were room conditions—the temperature, humidity, et cetera of the cubicle—and the rest was taken up by a list of the chemicals held within and their amounts, as well as a sign-out sheet for what Peter recognized were the more dangerous substances.

“Well now I know what’s  _ supposed  _ to be here…” Peter mumbled to himself as he walked toward the back of the safe. “Should make it a little easier to figure out what’s missing.”

In the far right corner were more crime scene markings around two different cubicles, both with the doors left open. He picked up the clipboard outside one of them.

“Only one chemical in here needs to be signed out.” He stepped through the door, peering at the boxes on the shelves until he found the one he was looking for. He put down the clipboard so he could open it up then referenced the sheet again. “Aaaaaand it looks like none of it is missing. Hmf.”

He took a step back to glance at the boxes again and one on the top shelf caught his eye. He reached up to pull it down and saw it was empty, as was the box next to it. He checked the labels.

“So the thieves needed a boatload of potassium? Isn’t that what bananas are for?”

_ “In its metallic form, potassium is highly active and reacts violently with both air and water—” _

“I know, Karen, I know,” he said. “It was a joke.” He shook his head. “But I doubt they stole it for its explosive properties. There are way easier ways to blow something up, especially if you already have alien weapons.”

He started to leave, putting the box back and stepping away from the shelves, when there was an unusually soft sound of metal grinding behind him at the same time as his spidey-sense spiked. He whipped around to find a gun pointed at his forehead.

“Take it easy,” the man behind the gun growled, his longish brown hair falling into his face. His gleaming metal arm— _ So cool! _ , Peter’s inner monologue shouted above the panic siren in his brain—was steady as it held the weapon, but the rest of him was not, his demeanor seeming uneasy, unbalanced. His eyes narrowed. Recognition flashed in Peter’s mind.

“Holy shit, you’re Bucky Barnes,” he breathed and the man, Barnes, frowned. “I saw you on the news, in DC. I mean,  _ I  _ wasn’t in DC,  _ you  _ were, I was watching here in New York, but I saw you on that huge ship thing and—”

“You’re the guy who climbs on walls,” Barnes interrupted. He took a step backward, lowering the gun from Peter’s eyeline but not taking it off him completely, and surveyed him up and down. “You’re shorter than I thought you’d be.”

Peter huffed. “That’s just rude.”

_ “Peter,”  _ Karen broke in,  _ “James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes is considered a dangerous fugitive and has known connections to HYDRA. My programming dictates I am to contact Tony Stark immediately.” _

“No, no, Karen, don’t call Mr. Stark!”

Barnes startled backwards a step, gun coming back up to Peter’s face. Peter held up his hands.

“Hey, hey, hey, we’re all good! We’re all good! No shooting necessary!” He turned his face slightly to the side to whisper furiously to Karen: “Do  _ not  _ call Mr. Stark. Override Guy-In-The-Chair two-two-seven-one.”

“Who the hell are you talking to?” Barnes kept the gun even. “Is someone listening in on us?”

“No one’s listening, I-I swear. It’s just my suit’s AI. She’s not a real person.”

Karen made a disgruntled noise that Peter opted to ignore. Barnes’s lips twisted into a grimace.

“What did you say about Stark? As in, Anthony?”

“Uh, ye-yeah,” Peter said. “Tony Stark. He’s, um. I know him. No one really calls him Anthony.”

Barnes seemed to consider the situation for a moment then lowered the gun so it was no longer trained on Peter. “Go home, kid,” he said. “This is over your head.” And he turned and walked toward the safe’s exit.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Peter lept over him, landing and spinning in place to face him, obstructing his path. Barnes winced at the flashlight suddenly in his face. “Would you just listen to me for two seconds? Please? I wanna help you.”

“Get out of my way.” He shouldered past Peter and Peter was startled for a moment by the strength in the movement, so used being as sturdy as a steel beam in the face of normal people. The realization that Barnes was enhanced like him was both exhilarating and a little terrifying.

“Listen, I get the whole, fugitive-on-the-run, can’t-trust-anyone thing, but I really, really just want to help,” he said to his retreating back. “And I’m guessing you’re here for the same reason I am, to investigate the theft, so maybe we could put our heads together and get this taken care of. Make the streets a little safer.”

Barnes paused with one hand on the doorway. He glanced back. “You took down that Vulture guy a couple weeks ago,” he said. “On Coney Island.”

“...yeah?”

“Why?”’

“What? What do you mean  _ why?”  _ Peter looked at him, confused, but Barnes didn’t elaborate. “I just— Someone had to, I guess. And I could. People were getting hurt and I could stop it, so. I did.”

“He could have killed you.”

Peter shrugged. “I’m still here. So I’ve still got work to do. Including figuring out who used his tech to rob this place and what they need the chemicals for.”

There was a long moment of silence in which Peter seriously, seriously considered just turning around and getting back to investigating on his own, leaving Barnes—who,  _ holy shit,  _ had been bestfriends with  _ Captain America  _ in  _ World War II _ —to go off and do whatever it was 100-year-old war heroes-slash-fugitives did. But then Barnes sighed, stepping back into the dim light of the safe and making his way again to the back corner of the room.

“C’mon, kid,” he said. “Might as well do this quickly.”

Peter bounced after him, stopping short in front of the doorway to the other broken into cubicle to grab the clipboard outside it. He started scanning the list as Barnes pulled down boxes.

“That an inventory?” Barnes asked.

“Pretty much. If we go box by box I can tell you what’s missing.” Barnes opened the lid of the container in his hands, tilting it forward so Peter could peek inside. “Looks like nothing was taken from that one.”

They went through every box in both cubicles, Peter having Karen compile a list a missing chemicals and their amounts that she displayed on the interface of his mask. As the list grew, Peter’s stomach soured, the substances reminding him of research he had done soon after discovering his powers.

“Karen,” he said softly when Barnes was in the other glass room, “does this look like what I think it looks like?”

_ “Although there is not enough information to know for sure, these do seem to match known attempts to recreate  _ _ Dr. Abraham Erskine’s original super soldier serum.” _

“I was really hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.” He sighed, poking his head out of the cubicle. “Hey, uh, Sgt. Barnes?”

“Yeah, kid?”

Peter’s spider-sense buzzed. He straightened, stepping out of the cubicle entirely to watch the door. As Barnes followed him he threw himself upward, sticking and crawling along the ceiling until he could peer through the gap at the currently empty hallway. 

“I think someone’s coming,” he whispered to Barnes.

“I can’t hear anything. How can you tell?”

“Call it a spider’s intuition.”

He squeezed through into the hallway and moved toward the stairwell as Barnes’ soft footfalls came up behind him. He cracked open the door to the stairs and listened.

Heavy boots, people tromping down the stairs, a whole group of them, two, maybe three storeys above. They didn’t speak, but they didn’t seem concerned about anyone hearing them. They moved quickly. Peter dropped to the ground.

“Group coming down the stairs,” he whispered.

“Shit.”

Barnes strode to the nearest lab door and tried the handle; locked. He huffed in frustration and then his arm whirred quietly and suddenly with a sharp  _ crack _ the handle jerked downward, the lock inside busted. Without glancing back, he motioned for Peter to follow him as he stepped inside.

“Where are we—”

Barnes cut him off with a hand motion. His voice was a breath above inaudible: “If you make noise, they’ll find us. So be quiet.”

Peter nodded and let Barnes lead him to the far side of the lab, as far away from the door and windows as they could get. Barnes pushed him down under a large, L-shaped desk covered in neat rows of empty vials and then crouched down behind an industrial sized centrifuge closer to the window, only barely hidden from anyone in the hallway. He put a finger to his lips and Peter nodded again.

The stairwell door creaked open.

The group marched into the space, seven in total if Peter was counting their footsteps correctly. They seemed to spread out. Securing the area, maybe. Whoever they were, they were professionals.

One of them passed by the window of the lab he was hiding in and he caught of flash of a blond crew cut and black tactical armor. A large rifle was held at the ready in his hands, a flashlight on the end of it sweeping through the room. As he turned, the symbol on his armband was thrown into enough light that Peter could make out what it was: an octopus with a skull head.

HYDRA.

Peter’s blood ran cold, his breath catching in his throat. He tucked himself as deep into the corner of the desk as he could, his heart hammering against his chest, his muscles tensing in near panic. Barnes threw him a concerned look and with trembling fingers Peter lifted the bottom of his mask to mouth the name. Barnes’s face grew darker.

“All clear,” the HYDRA member standing fifteen feet from Peter called. It was followed by a chorus of affirmations from the others in quick succession.

“Good,” a deep voice said from further back in the hall. “Charlie, Epsilon, secure the safe. We need to figure out what those rogue agents were after and be out of here within—” He paused for a second. “—twelve minutes.”

There was no response, only movement down the hallway and the beams of flashlights darting around the labs. Peter tried and failed to steady his breathing.

“Safe secure,” a different voice called. Five sets of feet moved slowly down the hallway and one by one their lights dropped out of view. Barnes eased over to the window and peered over the edge; Peter had to bit down on the instinct to call for him to come back. He looked for a moment, then turned back to Peter. He motioned toward the doorway.

Peter crawled out from underneath the desk and followed Barnes silently to the door. He pressed his back flat against the wall as Barnes inched the door open, then they both slipped through into the now empty hall. Peter chanced a look behind him and saw flashlight beams bouncing around the darkened interior of the safe. He hurried after Barnes into the stairwell. They took the stairs three at a time, racing upward.

“We need to get to the third floor,” Barnes huffed as they got above the subterranean levels. “I got a window open and came in that way.” Peter didn’t answer, just ran faster.

Barnes pushed ahead of him again as they got closer to their exit point, putting himself between Peter and the door as he went to open in. He checked the hallway quickly, found it empty, and they hurried on to the office Peter had originally entered through. Barnes shut and locked the door behind them.

“Now we just gotta get down,” he said, glancing out the window. “Street looks clear, but I don’t know if that’s going to be the case the whole time it takes up to climb down, so watch your six.”

“I’ve got a faster way,” Peter said and he took hold of Barnes’s waist before he could object and shot a webline to the building on the other side, rocketing them both across the street onto the opposite rooftop.

Peter landed easily, but Barnes stumbled and would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed onto Peter’s shoulder at the last second. He got his bearings and straightened up, a look of vague amusement in his eye when he turned around.

“Helluva way to get around.”

Peter didn’t answer. He instead walked back to the edge of the rooftop and peered at the chemicals lab.

“HYDRA,” he said. “Holy  _ shit.” _

“Yeah.” Barnes walked over next to him. He was frowning, eyes locked on where the agents were underground. “Holy shit.”

“We’ve got a lot of work cut out for us.”

Barnes shot him a look. “We?”

“Well, yeah,” Peter said. He flashed a big grin that was hidden under his mask. “We made a great team back there. Who better to handle this?”

Barnes scoffed, shaking his head, then grew contemplative. He stayed silent for a moment. “I guess if it keeps you from going after them yourself.” Peter’s head shot up.

“Does that mean you’re in?!” Barnes rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, kid, whatever. I’m in.”

“This is  _ so cool!  _ Oh man, you’re going to have to tell me everything about the 40s and what it was like growing up in the Great Depression and about being best friends with  _ Captain America  _ and—”

“I am going to regret this.”

**Author's Note:**

> yell abt spidey with me at peteyprker.tumblr.com


End file.
